Top 226 Quotes & Sayings by Reid Hoffman
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Reid Hoffman.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.
Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.
I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
Hard work isn't enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It's actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.
Death Row inmates are almost twice as expensive to house each year as other inmates. Death penalty trials are much costlier than trials where execution is not a potential punishment and consume more time from judges, public defenders, and other legal personnel.
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
I really like the 'Silicon Valley' show. It's good to do a little rib-poking and not take yourself too seriously, so I think it's awesome the show does that.
The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission - enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.
If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.
Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.
If performance management were a movie, it will become less 'Gladiator' and more 'Moneyball.'
LinkedIn allows professionals, including the middle class, to invest in themselves in order to find the right jobs. That essentially can help make them prosperous.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don't solve the right problem at the right time, that's the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.
Your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.
Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.
PayPal was disruptive, it was democratizing, and it had universal appeal. It gave power to millions and millions of individuals and reduced monopolist control from nations, banks, and other huge corporations.
Relatively few people should start companies.
As a candidate, Trump could make outlandish statements with little regard for their Constitutional implications. As President, he is pledged to respect the Constitution's authority, and the specific rights and protections it guarantees to every American citizen.
Democracy tends to be a collaborative process, a committee, a consensus. Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.
I think 'Settlers of Catan' is such a well-designed board game - it's the board game of entrepreneurship - that I made a knockoff called 'Startups of Silicon Valley.' It's literally - it's the same rules but just a different skin set to it.
What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.
As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it's a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.
Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
The key thing is to invest in the future, and what that means is - when you're deploying technology or you're a technology business - is to make sure that you're keeping on the innovation cycle, where you're both creating and adopting the new business practices and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.
It's unprecedented in the post-World War II era to have the leader of Germany say, 'Oh we can't rely on America anymore.'
I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.
The world's better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.
I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.
Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity.
We want to be inclusive. We want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we're doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, 'No, no, I just simply shouldn't get involved in politics.'
As a child, I wondered often, 'Why are we? What is the meaning of life?' These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning - not just individual lives, but all of our lives.
Broadly, the meaning of life comes from how we interact with each other. The Internet can reconfigure space so that the right people are always next to each other.
To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.
Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It's the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.
There's a lot of people in the world that would love to trade places with American citizens, and we are very fortunate to be here.
I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.
So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?
Observe, orient, decide, act. It's fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence - charging up the same hill again and again. But that's not quite what I mean by the word 'grit.' You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.
And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.
The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.
Each year, I ask, 'Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'
What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.
Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient - and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That's the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.
Entrepreneurs are like visionaries. One of the ways they run forward is by viewing the thing they're doing as something that's going to be the whole world.
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
In crisis times, it's actually not more difficult to motivate your staff, because everyone gets much more focused on how they control their own economic destiny.
Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
'Founder' is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.
When thinking about how to deploy kind of professional and social networking into your business, it's really not a question of if - it's a question of when.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
Business is the systematic playing of games.
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